


Six Months

by friendofspiderman



Series: Fictober 2020 [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Ben Parker Dies, Family, Family Feels, Ficlet, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentioned Ben Parker, Pre-Spider-Man: Homecoming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26788474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendofspiderman/pseuds/friendofspiderman
Summary: Fictober Prompt #3 - "you did this?"---May navigates a painful anniversary.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker
Series: Fictober 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953223
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	Six Months

May doesn’t know what she was expecting from this day.

It felt like the longest day of her life. The eight hour workday may as well have been twenty. She’d thought going in would help take her mind off the emptiness in her soul. It didn’t.

She doesn’t know what she’d hoped would happen. Did she think her coworkers would say something? _“Hey, May, sorry your husband died six months ago. I’ve been obsessively keeping track of the dates just like you, and I brought you a muffin to make you feel better.”_ And then she’d thank them, and truly be grateful because they’ve thought of her, but she’d save the muffin for Peter because when the grief weighs this heavily she can’t eat.

But those thoughts are absurd. Six month anniversaries of your husband’s death aren’t exactly celebrated. She shouldn’t be expecting anything.

And really, she shouldn’t _want_ to spend a day mourning Ben, because Peter was doing so much better lately. If she came home looking as depressed as she felt, it could ruin him.

But maybe that didn’t matter, either, because maybe he wasn’t even at the apartment. He hardly ever was anymore. He'd been in a great mood over the past month or so, but he was sneaking out and staying out at an increasingly alarming rate.

May’s been scared to confront him again. What if it rocks the boat too much and sends him back into the fog he inhabited in those first few months? She can’t handle the thought of that emptiness returning to his eyes. 

So maybe, just for tonight, it’s okay that Peter’s likely to be missing—off at Ned’s, walking in the park, in class at the gym—or whatever other explanation he goes with. If she has the apartment to herself, she can grieve however she needs to. She can sit on the sofa and sip white wine, feeling her soul ache at the missing place where Ben used to sit beside her. She can listen to his favorite old records, lie down and let the tears fall freely. She can look through photo albums from when they were first dating and lay her hands on the pages, drinking them in for far too long.

She takes the stairs instead of the elevator, because she’s just not ready. The ache of returning to an empty apartment on this day, on this wretched anniversary of _six months_ , is too much.

But when she opens the door, the apartment isn’t empty.

There are lilies in the kitchen. The photo albums are on the coffee table. James Taylor is singing from the record player. And standing, in the middle of it all, is her sweet fourteen-year-old nephew, holding a box of pizza from Joe’s.

“You did this?” She half-whispers, tears filling her eyes.

“Um—yeah,” Peter answers, eyebrows knit. “Is it—is it okay?”

She nods, the tears already falling, and reaches for him with both arms. He discards the pizza as they cling to each other as if that’s all that they have left—because it _is_.

“Thank you, Peter.” She says as she runs her hand through his hair. “I love you. So much.”

“I love you too, May.” He mutters into her shoulder.

Whatever buried expectations May’d had for the day, she’s sure Peter’s exceeded all of them. 

Her soul still feels empty. But tonight, the apartment isn’t. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3


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